Monday, 18 February 2013

MicroSoft Vs Google (The Scroogled War)

Scroogled?
Last week the tech
world also saw Microsoft launch a campaign against Google with the
headline "Don't get scroogled by Gmail". The software giant accuses the
internet giant of scanning the emails of Gmail users. According to MS,
70 per cent of the users are unaware that major email providers
routinely scan their mails. Microsoft’s solution is to offer its own
email service at Outlook.com. "Outlook.com believes your privacy is not
for sale," says MS.

Last year in the US, the Gmail was at the
second place with 69.1 million users. In the first place was Yahoo with
76.7 million users. Microsoft’s Hotmail was a sorry third with 35.5
million users. (Microsoft has decided to rebrand its service as and
asking the Hotmail users to migrate to the Outlook.com address.)

Although
Google has been facing these charges for a long time, this is the first
time Microsoft has decided to launch a frontal attack. It seems the
Redmond based company is too late to have a go at Google because the
search giant is well entrenched to swat away any form of attack.

The Petition To Nowhere

At the Scroogled site, Microsoft invites people to sign an online petition. In the week it has been up, it’s gathered about 5,600 signatures:
That’s hardly an overwhelming response, especially considering that the Gmail user base is reported at between 300 million to 425 million users.
Rounding up to 6,000 signatures, and using the lowest 300 million
figure, means that potentially, 0.002% of Gmail users have used the
petition to join Microsoft’s protest. Of course, not all of those signing are Gmail users, as I’ll explain
more below. And if Gmail has more than 300 million users, the percentage
of Gmail users signing the petition would be even lower. But it’s
already so tiny that give or take a million, ten million or even 100
million, it’s pretty clear Gmail users aren’t turning out to support
this petition.
Microsoft’s goal is to reach 25,000 signatures. With it currently
generating about 325 signatures per day, it might get there in another
two months. The day-by-day chart:

In
a reply to Microsoft a Google spokesperson Samantha Smith has said that
"Advertising keeps Google and many of the websites and services Google
offers free of charge... We work hard to make sure that ads are safe,
unobtrusive and relevant." The company also said that it was only
machines that searched the mails.

In a blow to Microsoft, its
search engine Bing fell to the fifth position in global ranking
according to comScore's qSearch data. At the top of the table is of
course Google. The second place goes to Baidu, the Chinese search engine
and the third place is occupied by Yahoo. Yandex, the Russian search
engine, that was at the fifth place moved up by one place to push down
Bing. So it appears that Baidu and Yandex will cause more worry for
Google than Bing. The rise of the two search engines proves that there
is a lot of potential for local search engines. When will India have a
search engine of its own?

There is also some happy news for
Microsoft. Contrary to the expectations Microsoft’s web browser the
Internet Explorer (IE) has held on to its position as the top browser
for PCs. According to NetMarketShare, the share of Google’s Chrome,
which was expected to breeze past Firefox, decline to 17.48 per cent.
Firefox itself has a 19.94 per cent share. But, the real hero was IE.
Its market share went up to 55.14 per cent in 2013 from the 51.87 per
cent share it had in December 2011, surprising the analysts.